Tag: postaweek

In Accordance With the Shutdown

In accordance with the partial shutdown of the US Federal Government, this blog has activated its contingency protocol to ensure compliance with the Antideficiency Act. Consequently, in order to maximize available resources and meet all of our ongoing mission requirements, the remainder of this post will include only prime-numbered words from a normal post.

Lately there has talk our something “Orwellian”. Accurate, interest public mind, examine original. That, “Theory Collectivism”, purpose writing. Library: Irreconcilable. Remain are. Trade with. Low, abiding intermittently daily, abolish distinctions, shall equal. History, same outlines again. Capacity govern. Overthrown the, enlist liberty. Objective, thrust servitude, cycle.

Low never. Softening revolution equality millimeter. Historic masters. Nineteenth, obvious observers. Cyclical, equality unalterable human. Doctrine adherents, change: hierarchical high. Aristocrats upon, compensation. Fraternity. Tyranny overthrown. […]

Oligarchies, circumstances. Practitioners, cheating. Knowledge delusion; rational. World-conquest fanaticism. Unexampled, the contradictions. Mystique paraphernalia.

Operation Treetopper

The last few weeks have been dominated by Operation Treetopper, my efforts to ensure that I close the year out successfully. Operation Treetopper started basically the moment that Operation Marketplace, my plan to avoid mid-semester complacency and ensure I was squared away when picking classes for next semester, ended. Operation Marketplace, in turn, followed Operation Overture, which covered the first few weeks of college classes. The point is that Treetopper has been a culmination of slightly more than seven months of effort and planning. 

The two primary objectives of Operation Treetopper were my German final exam, and my Sociology final paper. The German exam was fairly straightforward. I do my best to avoid serious studying for tests, because at least in my experience, it tends to do me more harm than good. Instead, I focus on learning any material that I haven’t already learned, because even though I miraculously avoiding missing class, there were a handful of occasions when circumstances conspired to prevent me from learning the material, and I had to bluff my way through assignments. 

Once that’s done, I make sure I know my German by putting on the top hits list for German speaking countries, and reading Der Spiegel, which translates as The Mirror, and is a major newspaper akin to the Times. I know that I’m making progress when I find the music distracting me from reading. I only ever find the music distracting when the words I’m hearing cross wires with words I’m reading or writing, so when the foreign songs cross that threshold, I know my brain has absorbed enough German that it considers them to be part of a language rather than just words. I don’t know if everyone’s brain works that way, or if it’s just mine, but this is how I pull off learning new languages without studying.
My sociology paper was another story entirely.

With retrospect, I can safely say that I overdid it for my sociology final paper. I mean that in both a positive and negative way. I picked a topic that I was really passionate about, which proved fertile for both research and commentary, and in the process created far more work for myself than was necessary or even prudent. 

With the benefit of retrospect, and having gotten a few glimpses of what other classmates eventually settled on, there are things I would’ve done differently. Off the bat, I would’ve started earlier. I wouldn’t say I procrastinated, because I gave myself more time than I thought I’d need. Except, I severely underestimated the amount of time and effort this project would require, and the number of documents, pages, spreadsheets, tables, and graphs it would generate for me to juggle and cull down into a final paper. 

Case in point: the assignment was to write four or five pages, and I assumed that I would have to fall back on my old authorial filibustering knack to fill space. In reality, I wound up barely butchering the final product down to five pages of writing, plus an additional eighteen pages of tables, graphs, data, and references that had to be put in an annex because I couldn’t fit them in the main paper, but needed them to make my point succinctly.
Also with the full benefit of hindsight, I would have been well served to take the professor up on his offer to meet and discuss refining and operationalizing topics for my survey. I didn’t do this because I thought my topic was already a sufficiently niche topic that it didn’t need refining. I was wrong about this, partly because, as previously mentioned, I vastly underestimated the length it would take to tackle my topic, but also partially because I expected that I would be working on well-trodden ground, scientifically, when in fact, near as I could tell from the literature review, my investigation proved to be fairly novel.

The other reason I didn’t want to refine my topic was because I was excited about it. I knew that I wanted to tackle medical identification and the factors going into adherence essentially since the moment I read the syllabus, and saw that we could do a survey for our paper. I knew it was topical to the course, and I knew that my background with the topic would enable me to write a paper that would earn me a good grade pretty much regardless of the details, but more than that, I wanted to tackle the topic. I was excited to use my newfound skills to tackle a real problem from my life that profoundly affects people I care about. 

This is, at least for me, the point of education. It’s why I go to class, even when I don’t feel well, or have better things to do. I want to learn, so that I can fix the world. And in my experience, when an exciting topic like this appears fully-formed, those are usually the best projects. Because whether or not they wind up getting the best score, they make the work of an assignment fun, and they’re good opportunities to learn something.

Moreover, this enthusiasm shows in the end product. There’s sometimes a trade off if following the thing you’re interested in means bending the criteria of the assignment (see again: twenty-three pages instead of five), but I’ve always found this to be a worthwhile trade off it it means I can give my best effort on something I care about. And I think most teachers feel the same way.

I don’t regret my choice of topic. And understanding that I made them based on what I knew at the time, I don’t regret the decisions I made about my paper. My biggest, and really only, complaint with the end product, is that I overestimated how long five pages was, and had to cut down my writing when I quite would’ve enjoyed expounding further on the results. 
Operation Treetopper has accomplished something that I wasn’t sure was possible- I have been able to declare victory for the end of the semester without any lingering make-up assignments, or uncertainty about whether I’m really done. It’s anticlimactic, and a little unreal to me. But it’s the best Christmas gift I could have wished for, and it gives me hope that next year can be even better.

On Hippocratic Oaths

I’ve been thinking about the Hippocratic Oath this week. This came up while wandering around campus during downtime, when I encountered a mural showing a group of nurses posing heroically, amid a collage of vaguely related items, between old timey nurse recruitment posters. In the background, the words of the Hippocratic Oath were typed behind the larger than life figures. I imagine they took cues from military posters that occasionally do similar things with oaths of enlistment. 

I took special note of this, because strictly speaking, the Hippocratic Oath isn’t meant for nurses. It could arguably apply to paramedics or EMTs, since, epistemologically at least, a paramedic is a watered down doctor, the first ambulances being an extension of the military hospitals and hence under the aegis of surgeons and doctors rather than nurses. But that kind of pedantic argument not only ignores actual modern day training requirements, since in most jurisdictions the requirements for nurses are more stringent than EMTs and at least as stringent as paramedics, but shortchanges nurses, a group to whom I owe an enormous gratitude and for whom I hold an immense respect. 

Besides which, whether or not the Hippocratic Oath – or rather, since the oath recorded by Hippocrates himself is recognized as being outdated, and has been almost universally superseded by more modern oaths – is necessarily binding to nurses, it is hard to argue that the basic principles aren’t applicable. Whether or not modern nurses have at their disposal the same curative tools as their doctorate-holding counterparts, they still play an enormous role in patient outcomes. In fact, by some scientific estimates, the quality of nursing staff may actually matter more than the actions undertaken by doctors. 

Moreover, all of the ethical considerations still apply. Perhaps most obviously, respect for patients and patient confidentiality. After all, how politely the doctor treats you in their ten minutes of rounds isn’t going to outweigh your direct overseers for the rest of the day. And as far as confidentiality, whom are you more concerned about gossiping: the nerd who reads your charts and writes out your prescription, or the nurse who’s in your room, undressing you to inject the drugs into the subcutaneous tissue where the sun doesn’t shine? 

So I don’t actually mind if nurses are taking the Hippocratic Oath, whether or not it historically applies. But that’s not why it’s been rattling around my mind the last week. 

See, my final paper in sociology is approaching. Actually, it’s been approaching; at this point the paper is waiting impatiently at the door to be let in. My present thinking is that I will follow the suggestion laid down in the syllabus and create a survey for my paper. My current topic regards medical identification. Plenty of studies in the medical field have exalted medical identification as a simple, cost-effective means of promoting patient safety. But compelling people to wear something that identifies them as being part of a historically oppressed minority group has serious implications that I think are being overlooked when we treat people who refuse to wear medical identification in the same group as people who refuse to get vaccinated, or take prescribed medication.

What I want to find out in my survey is why people who don’t wear medical identification choose not to. But to really prove (or disprove, as the case may be, since a proper scientific approach demands that possibility) my point, I need to get at the sensitive matters at the heart of this issue: medical issues and minority status. This involves a lot of sensitive topics, and consequently gathering data on it means collecting potentially sensitive information. 

This leaves me in an interesting position. The fact that I am doing this for a class at an accredited academic institution gives me credibility, if more-so with the lay public than among those who know enough about modern science to realize that I have no real earned credentials. But the point remains, if I posted online that I was conducting a survey for my institution, which falls within a stretched interpretation of the truth, I could probably get many people to disclose otherwise confidential information to me. 

Since I have never taken an oath, and have essentially no oversight in the execution n if this survey, other than the bare minimum privacy safeguards required by the FCC in my use of the internet, which I can satisfy through a simple checkbox in the United States. If I were so inclined, I could take this information entrusted to me, and either sell it, or use it for personal gain. I couldn’t deliberately target individual subjects, more because that would be criminal harassment than because of any breach of trust. But I might be able to get away with posting it online and letting the internet wreak what havoc it will. This would be grossly unethical and bordering on illegal, but I could probably get away with it. 

I would never do that, of course. Besides being wrong on so many different counts, including betraying the trust of my friends, my community, and my university, it would undermine trust in the academic and scientific communities, at a time where they have come under political attack by those who have a vested interest in discrediting truth. And as a person waiting on a breakthrough cure that will allow me to once again be a fully functional human being, I have a vested interest in supporting these institutions. But I could do it, without breaking any laws, or oaths.

Would an oath stop me? If, at the beginning of my sociology class, I had stood alongside my fellow students, with my hand on the Bible I received in scripture class, in which I have sought comfort and wisdom in dark hours, and swore an oath like the Hippocratic one or its modern equivalents to adhere to ethical best practices and keep to my responsibilities as a student and scientist, albeit of sociology rather than one of the more sciency sciences, would that stop me if I had already decided to sell out my friends?

I actually can’t say with confidence. I’m inclined to say it would, but this is coming from the version of me that wouldn’t do that anyway. The version of me that would cross that line is probably closer to my early-teenage self, whom my modern self has come to regard with a mixture of shame and contempt, who essentially believed that promises were made to be broken. I can’t say for sure what this version of myself would have done. He shared a lot of my respect for science and protocol, and there’s a chance he might’ve been really into the whole oath vibe. So it could’ve worked. On the other hand, it he thought he would’ve gained more than he had to lose, I can imagine how he would’ve justified it to himself. 

Of course, the question of the Hippocratic oath isn’t really about the individual that takes it, so much as it is the society around it. It’s not even so much about how the society enforces oaths and punished oath-breakers. With the exception of perjury, we’ve kind of moved away from Greco-Roman style sacred blood oaths. Adultery and divorce, for instance, are both oath-breaking, but apart from the occasional tut-tut, as a society we’ve more or less just agreed to let it slide. Perhaps as a consequence of longer and more diverse lives, we don’t really care about oaths.

Perjury is another interesting case, though. Because contrary to the occasionally held belief, the crime of perjury isn’t actually affected by whether the lie in question is about some other crime. If you’re on the stand for another charge of which you’re innocent, and your alibi is being at Steak Shack, but you say you were at Veggie Villa, that’s exactly as much perjury as if you had been at the scene of the crime and lied about that. This is because witness testimony is treated legally as fact. The crime of perjury isn’t about trying to get out of being punished. It’s about the integrity of the system. That’s why there’s an oath, and why that oath is taken seriously.

The revival of the Hippocratic Oath as an essential part of the culture of medicine came after World War II, at least partially in response to the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials and revelations about the holocaust. Particularly horrifying was how Nazi doctors had been involved in the process, both in the acute terms of unethical human experimentation, and in providing medical expertise to ensure that the apparatus of extermination was as efficient as possible. The Red Cross was particularly alarmed- here were people who had dedicated their lives to an understanding of the human condition, and had either sacrificed all sense of morality in the interest of satiating base curiosity, or had actively taken the tools of human progress to inflict destruction in service of an evil end. 

Doctors were, and are, protected under the Geneva Convention. Despite Hollywood and video games, shooting a medic wearing medical symbol, even if they are coming off a landing craft towards your country, is a war crime. As a society, we give them enormous power, with the expectation that they will use that power and their knowledge and skills to help us. This isn’t just some set of privileges we give doctors because they’re smart, though; that trust is essential to their job. Doctors can’t perform surgery if they aren’t trusted with knives, and we can’t eradicate polio if no one is willing to be inoculated.

The first of the modern wave of revisions of the Hippocratic Oath to make it relevant and appropriate for today started with the Red Cross after World War II. The goal was twofold. First: establish trust in medical professionals by setting down a simple, overriding set of basic ethical principles that can be distilled down to a simple oath, so that it can be understood by everyone. Second: make this oath not only universal within the field, but culturally ubiquitous, so as to make it effectively self-enforcing. 

It’s hard to say whether this gambit has worked. I’m not sure how you’d design a study to test it. But my gut feeling is that most people trust their own doctors, certainly more than, say, pharmacologists, meteorologists, or economists, at least partially because of the idea of the Hippocratic Oath. The general public understands that doctors are bound by an oath of ethical principles, and this creates trust. It also means that stories about individual incidents of malpractice or ethics breaches tend to be attributed to sole bad actors, rather than large scale conspiracies. After all, there was an oath, and they broke it; clearly it’s on that person, not the people that came up with the oath.

Other fields, of course, have their own ethical standards. And since, in most places, funding for experiments are contingent on approval from an ethics board, they’re reasonably well enforced. A rogue astrophysicist, for instance, would find themselves hard pressed to find the cash on their own to unleash their dark matter particle accelerator, or whatever, if they aren’t getting their funding to pay for electricity. This is arguably a more fail-safe model than the medical field, where with the exception of big, experimental projects, ethical reviews mostly happen after something goes wrong. 

But if you ask people around the world to rate the trustworthiness of both physicians and astrophysicists, I’d wager a decent sum that more people will say they trust the medical doctor more. It’s not because the ethical review infrastructure keeps doctors better in check, it’s not because doctors are any better educated in their field, and it’s certainly not anything about the field itself that makes medicine more consistent or less error prone. It’s because medical doctors have an oath. And whether or not we treat oaths as a big deal these days, they make a clear and understandable line in the sand. 

I don’t know whether other sciences need their own oath. In terms of reducing ethical ethical breaches, I doubt it will have a serious impact. But it might help with the public trust and relatability probables that the scientific community seems to be suffering. If there was an oath that made it apparent how the language of scientists, unlike pundits, is seldom speculative, but always couched in facts; how scientists almost never defend their work even when they believe in it, preferring to let the data speak for itself; and how the best scientists already hold themselves to an inhumanly rigid standard of ethics and impartiality in their work, I think it could go a ways towards improving appreciation of science, and our discourse as a whole.

Picture Postcard Perfect

The Holiday Stroll is my favorite event in town. Basically, the town where I live, which is at this point a suburb of the expanded New York City metropolitan area, pretends to be an independent village, so that the old money, Ivy League denizens can feel good about themselves living in a small town. This is a town with more millionaires per square mile than homeless. This is a town which, in the six years of my attendance, had exactly two African American students in a school of 4000. This is a town in which it is a routine occurrence for friends to invite each other to Paris for the weekend. After all, what good is a private jet if it just sits on the tarmac? This is a town where the beginning of the top tax bracket is considered poor.

Of course, not everyone who lives in town is wealthy. But regardless of the statistical breakdown, it is very much a wealthy town. Moreover, it is old money. Tom and Daisy Buchanan would fit right in here. The mansion they had in the most recent movie adaptation wouldn’t even be the most impressive of ostentatious house I’ve seen in town.

The town also isn’t without its problems. On the contrary, it has a noticeably higher rate of drug abuse than surrounding towns, despite a lower official crime and arrest rate. Alcohol abuse, especially among teens, is well known to be endemic, but never acknowledged aloud. The public high school continues to pay out millions in lawsuit settlements for discrimination against students, and rates of suicide are alarmingly high.

But these problems are well hidden. The streets are safe and well kept (at least the ones downtown are). Home prices and property values are kept high by refusing to allow rehabilitation clinics or public transport to sully our streets. Schools have exceedingly low dropout rates, and standardized test scores are consistently above average.

The town is really quite good at burying its problems and making everything seem peachy. With just over three hundred years of practice, the town is adept at playing the part of a sleepy New England village. In summer, rows of flags and bunting line the streets. In the fall, vivid foliage distracts the mind and spirit from myriad woes. In winter, the businesses on Main Street string up lights and garlands in order to create the setting of a Christmas special, or else replicate a model train village. So convincing is the transformation that the town is occasionally used as a setting for Christmas movies.

The highlight of all this decorating is the Holiday Stroll. Businesses stay open late, charitable groups host bake sales up and down the street, organizations give out free popcorn and cocoa. Ice carvers create vignettes around the shops with Holiday motifs. Choral groups roam the street singing carols, and people dress up in holiday garb, whether that be woolen sweaters and Santa hats, top hat and coattails, or over the top getups wrapped in tinsel garlands and battery powered lights. Policemen direct traffic to accommodate horse drawn carriages, while Santa takes wishes from children at town hall.

It’s a show that the whole town is in on. It’s beautiful and magical in a way that seems to be, momentarily, perfect. And you forget that this is a town where multiple people have been indicted by the FBI for financial crimes, where husbands commit suicide because they can’t provide the level of luxury expected by the local culture, and where the public schools have made civil rights lawsuit settlements the largest recurring expense in the budget, because they have come to the conclusion that paying off those who don’t fit the mould to attend private school somewhere else is preferable to reforming the system. It leaves me with a kind of Canto Bite feeling- I wish I could put my fist through this whole lousy, beautiful town.

I don’t know whether other towns without all of the baggage and what I am inclined to see as moral corruption have something similar to the Holiday Stroll. I hope so, because it means there’s hope for keeping what I like about my town while excising the bad parts. But I don’t know whether that’s possible. I know part of what gives the Holiday Stroll its peculiar magic is the sense of authenticity. Hallmark holiday specials choose our town as the location where handsome and rich protagonists must overcome upperclass upbringing to see the true meaning of Christmas and family for a reason. People wear fancy sweaters and top hats to drink fancy liquor served chilled through ice sculptures at the jewelry store’s open house because that’s what this town is.

Learning Abilities

If I have a special talent, it is that I am very good at learning a lot of things quickly. This isn’t the same thing as being a fast learner; I’m not a fast learner. If something doesn’t click the first time I’m exposed to it, there’s a very good chance it’s going to take me a long time to wrap my head around it. I suppose that makes me lucky, then, that most things tend to click. My real talent is being able to work with lots of information in a format where everything is new, and rapidly put together connected pieces in order to deduce the underlying patterns.

I realized I had this talent in High School, where it served the purpose of helping me bluff my way through classes in which I had no business participating. Most egregiously, in English class, where my class participation counted for a disproportionate percentage of my grade, and my chronic illnesses meant I frequently arrived back just as the class had finished reading a book of which I hadn’t received a copy. On many occasions, I would earn points by building off or reflecting upon points raised by other students. On two occasions, I wrote essays about books I had never held, much less read. I got A’s on both essays, and never scored below an 87% (which was only ever so low because the teacher counted two missed exams as zeros rather than allowing me to retake them) in English as a whole.
Some friends of mine have called this cheating. I disagree. I never claimed that I read the books in question. On the contrary, on the occasions that I mentioned the fact that I had never received a copy to my teachers, I was told simply to try my best to keep up with the class in the meantime while they tracked down an extra copy. So the teachers were aware, or should have been aware, that I was talking off the cuff. I never consulted some other source, like sparknotes, that wretched hive of plagiarist scoundrels and academic villainy.
In any case, I have found this talent to be most useful when diving into a new area. I may not be able to become an expert faster than anyone else, but I can usually string enough information together to sound like I know that of which I speak, and ensure that my questions are insightful and topical, befitting an enlightened discussion, rather than shallow and obvious questions betraying a fresh initiate to the field. This means that I am, perhaps ironically, best in my element when I am furthest behind. I learn more faster by throwing myself into the deep end of something I know nothing about, than reviewing stuff I mostly know.
Secretly, I suspect this is actually not a unique talent. I think most, or at least, many people, learn effectively this way. But whether through a school system designed on a model intended more to promote martial regimentation than intellectual striving, or a culture that punishes failure far more sharply than it incentivizes the entrepreneurial experimentation necessary for personal academic success, we have taught ourselves to avoid this kind of behavior. But whether this talent is mine alone, or I have merely been the first to recognize that the emperor has, in fact, no clothes, this places me in a unique situation.
The problem comes when called upon to follow up on initial successes. Usually this is, in practice, a moot point, because this is precisely where I get sick, miss class, and wind up behind again, where I can capitalize on my skill set and come rocketing back in the nick of time. But this year, with a few exceptions, I have been healthy, or at least, healthy enough to keep up. It turns out that when you follow a course at the intended pace of one week per week, instead of missing months in a febrile delirium and frantically tearing through the textbook in the space of a frantic fortnight, things are, for the most part, manageable.
This is a novel, if not inherently difficult, problem for me- learning at an ordinary pace, instead of a crash course. It’s the informational difference between a week long car trip and an overnight flight. You’d think that learning in such an environment, with one new thing among eleven things I already know, would be easier than taking in twelve new things. But I find that this isn’t necessarily true. I’m good at taking in information,but rubbish at prioritizing information.

Which Side Are You On?

So a friend of mine grew up in Thousand Oaks, and has been rather devastated by the shooting there. She’s already pretty upset about how US politics are going, and I think this hit her especially hard. So I decided to write a song, not so much to cheer her up, because me trying to cheer someone else up about politics would be a case of inmates volunteering to run the asylum, but rather, in solidarity.

Among many strong contenders, I think gun control might be the most divisive issue in US politics. Explaining why would itself constitute starting an argument, for which I’m not really in the mood. But the divisiveness of the issue, particularly of late, put me in mind of some of the words of Arlo Guthrie.

I had the opportunity to see and hear Arlo Guthrie live on two occasions. And the thing about Arlo Guthrie is that he’s as much a storyteller as a singer. Just as interesting as the actual songs was the context he gave for them, about how he came up with them, why he sang them, and the like. He talked about how he saw his songs as a living medium. Someday, he said in his lead up to Alice’s Restaurant, someone would write songs that would solve major social issues and bridge the divides that separate us.

He made no claim that his songs were those, but he did say that he thought they might be a stepping stone. And he said that he expected that the next generation of songwriters would use his songs as templates and starting points, just as he had used the previous generation’s melodies and rhymes to give them new life. He said he expected this and welcomed this, in the grand folk and protest song tradition.

So, in the grand tradition, I borrowed a melody from an old labor song, Which Side Are You On (famously covered by Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, and the Dropkick Murphys, among others) to express the new dilemma facing our generation.

Chorus:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Tell me, which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

They say in Parkland County
Kids don’t feel safe in school.
They say they won’t be coming back
Until we change the rules.

[Chorus]

I grew up next to Newtown,
My friends lost friends that day,
Our school goes into lockdown
But it’s not the guns they say.

[Chorus]

Oh parents can you stand it?
Tell me how you can?
When your children are murdered
For lack of a weapons ban?

[Chorus]

Arise all you good students,
Stand up for your own lives
For you know what senators don’t
You can’t be shot with knives

[Chorus]

God Save America

So, something happened this last weekend. I was playing Kaiserreich for Hearts of Iron IV. I’ve talked about Hearts of Iron a bit here already, but to quickly recap: Hearts of Iron IV is a grand strategy WWII game. You lead a country through history starting in 1936, with full control from the largest policy decisions down to the individual fighter. It’s the kind of game you imagine army cadets using to test strategies… if the AI were a bit more competent and the game rules a little harder to exploit based on the number-crunching nature of it.

Anyways, one of the few major flaws about the game is that there are only so many variations of WWII that you can really play through before you start to tire of storming beaches in France and encircling spearheads in Russia. Fortunately, the game is easily moddable, and there is a core community of enthusiasts who work tirelessly, dreaming up new abilities, rules, units, technologies, and alternative histories. One of the great products of this community is Kaiserreich: The Legacy of Weltkrieg.

The basic premise of Kaiserreich is simple: what if Germany won the First World War? This simple thought experiment has given birth to a project which is, in some ways more expansive in content and lore than the game in its off the shelf state. Every country is impacted by the changes of a German victory, and no detail is too small for this group. It is evident that this is a labor of love, with untold thousands of hours invested in crafting unique politics and identities for each new country. But the real triumph of Kaiserreich is the variability: Whereas the base game is inherently limited by its mooring to real history, in Kaiserreich, almost anything is possible.

The way the game proceeds is not totally random, but it is variable, and it can hinge on the smallest of things. For instance, rumblings in the Ecuadorian export sector can cause economic ripples in North America which delay the arms shipments which prove decisive to Imperial Germany’s defense of Elsaß-Loringen from the Commune of France. As a result, a good player is always watching the news headlines, of which there are plenty written into the game, to sense potential sea changes before they happen.

Of particular interest is the Second American Civil War, which is not actually inevitable, even in this timeline where the US lacks the post-WWI consensus, and the fall of Britain and France make liberal democracy seem like it is on the way out. The civil war can be avoided, but it is rare to see the AI achieve this if you are playing another country. As a result, the first several months are spent helplessly reading news events, as the United States seizes and spams towards violent collapse.

And there are plenty of events to read about. From the Battle of the Overpass, in which United Auto Workers clash with Ford security, to the infamously racist broadcasts of Charles Coughlin in support of demagogues like Huey Long and William Dudley Pelley, there are no shortage of canaries in the coal mine. The civil war may not be inevitable, but it does not come out of nowhere.

For a moment on Saturday, I thought I was reading the wrong screen. Someone had posted a BBC article about a shooting in a synagogue in New York. My brain took in the information: a politically motivated terror attack, followed by a response from the president that fell somewhere between ineffectual and inflammatory, meaning that within a few hours this terrorist act had become just another geographical feature in the political landscape. Instead of inspiring pause and sober reflection, a blatant act of political violence became just another thing that happened.

It took me a moment to realize that I was reading from the BBC, and not the in-game story. For a split second my brain had categorized this attack as happening in the game, because obviously this was a sign of a country in a deep political crisis bound for violent dissolution. And for that split second, I was content in the knowledge that even if it was a particularly realistic interpretation of alternative history, it could never happen here, in today’s America. I could enjoy the game because I don’t have to deal with it. But no. This is not a game. The people killed in the synagogues of Philadelphia, and the churches of Charleston, and on the streets of Charlottesville are not mere pixels, but people.

It is true that it is easy to make prophecies of doom, to claim that the end is nigh and the fall of the republic is imminent. And it is also true that plenty have made such forecasts before, some under circumstances which seemed far more dire, and have always been wrong so far. The trouble with extrapolating from bad events is that there’s a difference between a cluster of bad results, and symptoms of a doomed system. The former is troubling, but fails to take account of the enormous collective effort required to overcome the inertia of stability.

What concerns me so deeply about reading about this latest shooting is not the event itself, but how easily my mind mistook it for part of the story of how the US fell apart. What concerns me is that we might already be on that path, and it will be impossible to know unless we learn it too late. If we are, then it means that urgent and energetic action is needed to restore norms to our society and political system. It is not yet too late, but it means we may no longer be complacent.

It is no longer enough to complain idly to friends when we see others degrading the democratic norms and principles that this country great. I include myself in this statement. The earlier we commit, the better the chances are that we will be able to overcome the present impasse with a minimum lasting collateral damage. And if this alarm turns out to be the momentary reaction to passing circumstances, then this commitment will not be in vain. For our investment in this great democracy will serve as an investment in the future of our society.

Of note; the single event in Kaiserreich which has the largest impact on whether the United States lives or dies, isn’t Huey Long’s paramilitaries, or Jack Reed’s strikes, nor the machinations of MacArthur and his stratocrats. The thing that decided the fate of America more than anything else is the results of the 1936 election. All the efforts of those larger than life figures are moot if the election swings the other way. The election itself isn’t enough to singlehandedly avert the civil war, but if the American voters don’t do their part and vote, it becomes only a matter of time until thins collapse.

So for the love of god and country, if you’re eligible, go and vote. Get involved. Whether you believe things are headed for trouble or not, whether or not you agree with me, take part in democracy.

Attn Millenials

The website analytics suggest that the majority of my audience are young Americans, so I’d like to take a moment to address this group specifically. Everyone else can take the week off.

Alright, guys, gals, and non-binary pals, listen up: I think we may have made a mistake. I’m concerned that recent events indicate that the oldsters don’t actually know what they’re doing any more than we do, which is what we assumed when we, collectively as a demographic, decided we could get away with not voting. According to the census bureau, less than half of us who were eligible voted in the last election, compared to more than 70% of oldsters.

Now, I’m not going to try and pin the blame everything bad that’s happened in politics on the elderly, but I am starting to think that we might need to step in. The geezers have had their chance, now it’s our turn.

The bad news is that this is going to require a commitment, from all of us. How much of a commitment will depend largely on where you live. Voting is easier to do in some states and localities than others. Some towns you can waltz into a polling place without any wait, and even register day of if you’ve forgotten. Other places require you to have your papers in order months ahead of time, wait in lines that rival Disney world, and endure cross examination from misanthropic poll workers.

This discrepancy is not accidental. These are the jurisdictions that fear us and the power we hold as voters, as well they should. These measures are designed to frustrate you into apathy. Don’t let them.

The good news is, no matter where you live in the United States, your right to vote is sacrosanct. To this end, there are resources you can call upon to help ensure your voice is heard. There are multiple nonprofit organizations dedicated to ensuring you have all the information necessary to jump through whatever hoops exist for voting in your jurisdiction. Your state government will have sample ballots with voting instructions. Local organizations provide transportation to the polls on voting day, and if necessary you can enlist help to cast your ballot if you have a disability.

Ideally, you will want to be an informed voter. This is where having access to a sample ballot is especially helpful. You can research candidates and issues beforehand and take notes. Don’t worry about studying; you’re entitled to take notes with you into the voting booth. But above all, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Voting at all is far more important than researching until you find a perfect candidate.

Our time is nigh. We, the young voters of America must stand up and take charge. The old guard have demonstrated that they do not know any better, and are no more qualified to vote or make decisions about our the fate of our country and our world than any of us. It is in our best interests, as well as our obligation, to step up and take responsibility, before outside events thrust that responsibility upon us.

Keeping Our Country Great

The United States is a truly marvelous country. It isn’t that other countries don’t have similar freedom, domestic tranquility, or prosperity. What makes the United States truly stand out isn’t any of these in particular, or even in combination. It isn’t anything that can be measured or exported. Rather, it is the notion that all of these things listed; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; are not only inviolable, but sacred. Freedom of speech, security of property, and opportunity without discrimination are not merely tools to help society progress and prevent other injustices, but are fundamentally good in themselves. This, not our army, or economy, or laws, or geography, is what makes America unique. These are what make America great

But while these things make us strong, they also makes us vulnerable. That we hold such things to be sacred means that we often take them for granted. After all, if something is God-given and ordained, how can we mere mortals mess it up? This kind of attitude leads to a dangerous complacency, making us believe that freedom is free, or that only one kind of sacrifice from a small handful of brave souls is required to defend it.

The truth is that freedom, even American freedom, is fragile, and easy to lose. Like any sacred thing, freedom is only maintained through conscious dedication. The moment Americans stop treating freedom as a tangible practice that needs to be defended, and instead refer to it as an abstract thing that will always exist, the United States is just another country with laws and rhetoric that reference strong principles, rather than the bastion of democratic values. On that day, Americans will still have all the same rights, but it will become a simple task of modifying the laws to take them away, because there will be no more taboo.

So, how do we do it? How do we keep our principles alive and strong in such times? How do we make sure that the freedom, prosperity, and security we enjoy will survive to be passed onto our grandchildren? The answer is surprisingly simple. We must, all of us, make a commitment to partake in the rites of this country, not just in obligatory way that we pay taxes, but with the zeal of citizens who believe in the vision of their country’s future.

We must engage with our political system, force our representatives to earn their pay by engaging with us, and above all, vote. We must become and remain engaged citizens. We must earn our values through our actions.

The Protest No-Vote

Among my friends, the most common excuse I hear for not voting is spite. People think that not voting is a form of protest. In their minds, the system is deeply flawed, all of the candidates are bad, and so the only way to have a truly clear conscience is to abstain entirely. With respect to my friends who believe this, and I do indeed respect them, this behavior is childish and self-defeating, and needs to stop.

Now, to be clear, if you honestly believe that all of the candidates are exactly equally bad on all matters; that they are truly not only morally equivalent, but morally identical, and if forced to choose, you could genuinely do no better than tossing a coin, except that presumably you respect the process enough to feel shame at being so capricious, then I will begrudgingly concede that indeed, you oughtn’t vote. If you tragically lack the comparative reasoning and foundational convictions to come to any inkling of a preference, then I suppose it would be above you to fill out a ballot paper. You leave me disappointed, but if you genuinely can’t see a difference, I won’t ask you to fake it.

Fortunately, I have met exactly no one who believes that at their core. Everyone has some set of beliefs and values that they reckon are fundamentally correct, and want to see in the world. Some people are more upfront, some are more nuanced, but everyone has an idea of how the world ought to be run.

There are two main arguments I hear in protest non-votes, both of which are similar, but subtly different. The first holds that withholding one’s vote is a radical act of defiance by refusing to participate in the system. This is seldom justified, but when it is, usually has something to do with “the system being rigged and elections are all for show” and “by refusing to vote, we send a message that the government doesn’t have the consent of us governed”. The first justification is, at best, misleading, and at worst, a conspiracy theory. If rigged refers to gerrymandering and biased voting laws, then this is a great reason for voting and changing the system. If rigged refers to a conspiracy to prevent change, then there’s not really anything to be lost by voting, is there?

The second justification has a little more to unpack. It refers to the language used in the founding documents of the United States and the philosophical writings it draws upon in turn. If you never learned civics, the basic idea is that government derived its power from the consent of the governed, and this consent is required for the enforcement of laws to be justified. This is most directly exemplified in democratic elections, but theoretically can be more abstract, like a popular revolution that installs an unelected government (this usually works better on paper than in practice).

The idea here is that not voting is a way to undermine the whole system; that if enough people don’t vote, the government won’t have the legitimacy to pass and enforce laws, and presumably those who don’t vote won’t have to pay taxes. The myriad problems with this line of thinking are apparent, but here are my two big ones: First, this bets a lot on everyone interpreting your signal the same way and agreeing to act on it. In practice, this is like trying to make a speech without talking. Politicians don’t put in the effort for people who are t participating. And second, it doesn’t really undermine the legitimacy of the government so long as you willingly waived your right to vote.

The second main argument I hear for not voting as a moral stance holds that voting is a moral exercise, and that a person casting a ballot must be willing to accept all of the elements of a candidate: policies, character quirks, scandals, and the like, good and bad. The argument goes that if you don’t accept all of this, then you have no moral standing to say that one person is better than the other. You have to own your choice, and if you can’t get behind it one hundred percent.

This is a classic argument in philosophy, deontology versus consequentialism. The argument boils down to: it is morally worse to add any amount of evil to the world than to do good at the cost of some small evil. This is the line of thinking that says that it is immoral to divert a runaway trolley from hitting five people to hit one person instead, because the act of diverting it is a moral choice as opposed to a consequence of existing factors.

I am not totally unsympathetic to this argument. But it falls apart when applied to elections. The underlying moral argument here presupposes that everyone is supposed to act in this way, always behaving according to strict and inviolable principles of right and wrong. The argument holds that a bad person being elected is not an individual wrong so long as a given person did not endorse them by voting; it is mere circumstance. But elections are precisely the summation of individual choices. There can be no mere circumstances in elections. They are always the consequences of moral choices.

Sometimes these choices turn out to be wrong in retrospect. But if a lack of hindsight can be called a failure, it is a failure of analysis, not of morality. Failing to vote does not disclaim responsibility, but actively avoids a moral choice out of cowardice. Let me submit then that the superior maxim is to always vote in the manner which best aligns with one’s own sense of morality. Your goodwill does no good if you do not express it in your actions.

The lesser of two evils is still the less evil choice. You will not find a flawless human being, let alone a politician, but someone has to be elected, and you have to do your part to decide who, and hold them accountable. Failing to do so is a failure of your moral obligations as a citizen. You don’t have to make the perfect choice. But not making the choice of voting is abandoning your good will and intentions in favor of the security of cowardice. If you decide you truly can’t live with any of the mainstream candidates, there are always third party and write-in candidates. Or failing all else, a spoiled ballot is a far more effective protest than inaction. But do not allow yourself to give up your choice because the choice is hard.